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Visualizing Resource Management – the art, the science and the power to visually plan and position the right resources, in the right places, at the right times. Sounds like a fairly straight forward concept and should be wrapped into every ERP, Logistics and CRM related software consumed by any organization.

And that’s where the opportunity presents itself – most enterprise systems do not employ visual resource planning and scheduling. The complexities of visually representing multi-dimensional resource scheduling data is challenging and very rewarding when you get it right. There are two products that have stood the test of various industries for the last twenty years and have got it right, every time.

Of course these products didn’t start out as they are today – through the course of your enterprise management demands and coding challenges, Studio Controls and Solutions Schedule have been influenced and have evolved significantly over the course of the last twenty years. To where we are at this time – the strongest most feature rich, natural user interface design controls available – consumed by commercial software companies for myriad industries around the world.

Welcome to 2016! The next step in the evolution of Visual Resource Management, Natural Language Processing and Text Analytics. We have a number of exciting new developments to share with you in course of the next number of months. First, we’re going to start with a number of product updates, then shortly after that a whole new multi-faceted scheduling control and then the world of how we search, divine and consume information changes.

Kanban is a common development strategy with software development teams today, helping to optimize requirements, resources, experience (skills) and process. The concept, to visualize the elements involved in software development allowing for dynamic involvement and fluid outcomes. In other words, manage all of the resources – visually and in a way that is responsive to incremental change without over-stressing anyone of the key elements along the way.

Kanban has evolved into six primary practices for successful outcomes. Not surprisingly, the first practice involves visualization and identifying the primary elements of work flow, which then steps into managing Work In Progress for optimizing resources. The third and fourth practices involve Flow Management and Explicit Policies which provide mechanisms for monitoring activity transitions and the rules for moving the project along (the business rules for your implementation of Kanban). Operational review and collaborative process improvement round-out the primary practices – the methods by which continuous improvements are realized.

What’s interesting about Kanban is that its origin lies at the heart of Toyota automobile production systems. A lean, just in time logistics production planning / scheduling system (lean manufacturing) developed by an intriguing individual by the name of Taiichi Ohno. His goal was to produce a system that optimized the logistics of production based on a pull strategy – along the lines of supermarket operations.

Whether your view is production line, outbound resource planning, global logistics or development process – the key is creating a visual presentation that is responsive, intuitively descriptive and malleable so it can be consumed in multiple implementations, supporting your primary principles – Solutions Schedule.